You can deny it all you want, but the fact remains that what has gone wrong has gone wrong on Bloomberg’s watch. On Wall Street he would have been fired. He delegated some matters and allowed other matters to be taken away from his control (and, as I’ve said the responsibility for this fiasco is not all his), but the fact remains that he was not concentrating on what was going on Downtown, and he should have been. If he had been doing his job, this famously-micromanagerial mayor, this banner of ashtrays, would have done something. He didn’t until too late. Why not? The Stadium.

I might add that it’s also interesting to speculate whether the reason that Bloomberg was prepared to surrender so much control over Downtown to Pataki in the first place was that he had been given (or so he thought) a free hand on the West Side.